Cable television network operators nowadays are making changes on a regular basis (e.g. adding new services). More services implies need for more cable television network-bandwidth and in practice, much of the additional bandwidth is required for “Narrowcast” services solutions such as Switched Digital Video (SDV), Video On Demand (VoD), and Time Shifted Television (TSTV).
Unlike broadcast, with narrowcast, the bandwidth consumption depends not only on the content-encoding, but also on activity patterns of viewers that watch the new content. For example, new content that is rarely watched has little effect on narrowcast bandwidth resources while popular new content has a major effect.
Changes like adding a new service often requires cable television network changes as well (e.g. addition of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) modulators, splitting service-groups etc.)
One of the problems with narrowcast is that prior to the deployment of the change, it is hard to predict what would be the effect on narrowcast bandwidth usage. For example, until the deployment of new content it is hard to tell when it will be watched, what will be the concurrency, and as such how much additional bandwidth (BW) it will require.
If an operator deploys a change that requires much more BW, the result would be BW shortage resulting in bad service. Low service level due to BW shortage may include too high denial-of-service rate (e.g. cannot open TSTV or VoD session or cannot tune into an SDV channel), high latency of services responding to subscribers' actions (e.g. slow channel-change response, slow download), low video quality, etc.
The task of cable television network planning for such additions is therefore not an easy one and today cable television network operators are forced to work in baby-steps, implementing small changes, that should work with large safety margins and analyzing their real impact a few days afterwards. Implementing changes in such small steps is costly as well as slow.
Furthermore, many narrowcast solutions are much more BW efficient when used and configured optimally and are not beneficial if used incorrectly. If, for example, most popular services are delivered through SDV, operator gets no benefit from SDV solution. However, configuring narrowcast cable television network services correctly is not trivial. Currently, operators do not have an established means to optimize configuration (for example, select the most suitable programs to be delivered on the SDV tier, or optimal proper service-group size for narrowcast solutions). Therefore, some less-than-optimal settings are typically used and, as a result, the narrowcast solution efficiency is harmed.
There are prior-art solutions that monitor existing BW utilization in Cable Television (CATV) narrowcast applications. There are no known solutions that help estimate how a given change would impact BW utilization, or to optimally configure the network
There is, therefore, a need for systems and methods for forecasting and cable television network-planning of narrowcast services.